A few years the UK government also said it didn't want the England cricket team to tour Zimbabwe. As this would have cost the English Cricket Board a large fine, which the gonvernment wouldn't pay, the team went. Today the Australian government have announced that they would pay any fines levied if their cricket team pulled out of a tour of Zimbabwe. Whilst I applaud the Australian approach I do have to wonder if it's a step too far.

So should politics intrude on sport ? If the answer is yes, how far is this to be taken & should governments be made to pay if they expect sport associations to suffer for their principles.

There's an essay by Orwell in which, very convincingly, he argues that international sport and politics are one and the same. I agree with him and would offer as evidence an England v Argentina football game or Holland v Germany. To say nothing of the current West Ham/ Whelan affair. Whether we like it or not, the decision to tour or not tour Zimbabwe is a political decision. Let's face it, the Australians' decision was not made for cricketing reasons.

Andy has put it very well and I agree.

National governments do not spend millions trying to host the Olympic games because they like sport.
Politics and sport are inexorably intertwined and politicians are perfectly well aware of this.
I find it remarkable that there are still sportsmen and women - actually you rarely hear women trotting out the delusional garbage that sport is not political because they've often had to fight lengthy political battles to even be recognised or accepted or both in their particular sporting endeavour - still saying that their sport has nothing to do with politics. You would think that if they'd even a remote grasp of history they might have noticed how the 1936 Berlin Olympics was used by a particular political party for its own ends.
Thinking about it, I would suggest that you'd also find it very hard to find a black sportsman or woman that would agree with the ludicrous assertion that sport has nothing to do with politics. It seems to be a very conservative white male thing. But then conservative white males are so reliably and consistently full of crap it should come as no surprise that they'd come out with such tosh in the first decade of the 21st century.

I seem to remember that the Right were quite happy to bring politics into sport in 1980 over the Olympics...

Bloddy right. Here's a quotation about Alan Wells

"[the year] begun with Margaret Thatcher's government pressuring him and other athletes not to attend the Games. 'We received maybe half-a-dozen letters from 10 Downing Street trying to put us off. I opened one. There was a picture with a letter saying this is what the Russians are doing. It showed a dead Afghan girl with a doll. I can still see the picture even now as if it were yesterday. It made me feel very angry that we were being pressured to this extent."

Bitch.

i thought alan wells was alright.....

Ironic, of course, that Sebastian Coe went.